My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites

My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites is the result of a daily investigative writing practice, in which I was worried that a poem invested in the particulars of my life would be uninteresting—that the "ordinary" would be mundane. Instead memory, dreams, and the associative power of the imagination filled each moment with meaning, each tv show I watched or friend I spoke with, each outfit I wore or nail polish color I chose. In these poems, a combination of dread (for something approaching) and anxiety (for what might be approaching but isn't yet known) undid a sense of the present separate from climate change, global racial capitalism, whiteness, and gender-based violence, especially as I wrote as I tried to find out how my own gender fit into the world. The prose poem is the vehicle by which a recording practice ("journaling") meets the associative power of the poem.

from Meteor

If I focus on the window, the trees move me south. Birch, acacia, willow, oak, these are not their names. One question is about how much can be willed into the world, whether this is a form of activism or a deadly distraction. Similarly, an electronic bird gathers data about rainforest animals far from my own, as the study population slowly diminishes. That is, I recently imagined living for 900 years. So much cruelty. When even ten years ago I could barely imagine crossing twenty. Autocorrect: bare image. I create in my mind each next square, but it is so much effort. The glass darkens with it. Dog using his tail as a brush erasing the path. That’s wonderland, that’s right now. I wished to become a starfish collecting human hair softly in the ocean, beautiful in my slow accumulation of toxins. Take them in, take them in, they lull me irregularly to sleep.

from Meteor

The shadow of a hair as it grows longer unfurls into the leg of a preying mantis. No one sleeps and we are already dead. We are accepting this, or I am trying to do so without giving up. If the prism scatters, still we hold each color together until we reach a new surface. There are no excuses. A book I read telegraphs the truth of an experience, or one truth, in a real kind of realism like perfumed hair. A speculative moth under the moon. A speculative tulip bulb which grows into other kinds of bulbs: Edison’s, scientists. Multi-purpose latex has been engineered to grant you vision in the dark, even if you did not have vision in the light. I am happy for this vision of a life but wish for a transformation instead. I have never read a book that mirrored my gender and like books anyway: is it unnecessary, then, or is there an absence that, if filled, would flood? Again, I understand calm as an absence. I understand repression as an absence still filling the lungs with water.

Apparent Corona

—Myung Mi Kim



First name last name harm.First name last name death.Flowers are beautiful.This is heavy.Someone else will drink the wine.First name last name prize.

*

Snow falls as rain.Mucus accumulates.A plan one year in advance.Feeling of belonging to the imminent past.Sphere blue with futility.

*

Face ruptures.Stress thump.Stress thump.Strange fullness.The heat turns on.

*

White footpath.Diamond circle.Brain and brain and skull.Vanishing steps.There is no obvious correlation to the poem.

*

Bloomed skin, red rash.Anallergic.Illicit profusion.Each chapped lip takes in dust.I have to emerge into the world.

*

Small series of replacements.Quotidian effect of pain.I wake up tired.The failure lain down to sleep.I throw what little energy I have left at the wall.

*

The scars in continual rupture.Open mouth.Lip & whitehead.The human skin regenerating cleanly.(The scar erodes.)

*

How is it a virus is not contagious.Little bloom.Little archipelago under the skin.I google thrush, I google anxious death.I seem to be truly changing.

*

It is not twilight.Other names are fear or grief.To move on and through a feeling, the feeling must be honored.Some encounters could have been avoided.

*

A scream.The screen shakes.I am not crying.I want this blurred hour to continue.

*

New room.I felt as if a stranger walked through the wall.The heart rate settles.The heart rate rises.

*

A timespan holds sadness.A shape like a holster.

from Cold Meteor

I cannot decide if I am also a new object. I do not think of myself as having good vision because I wear glasses; there is sensation in the eyes of irritation. And hunger. Is this an automatic process, how a dryer sheet collects each sultry mote to itself? Is this an unrestful mind sprawled on the ceiling of a kaleidoscopic home? There was nothing sexual there, sprawled on my back in the sun, not even when I encountered others’ anxieties, naked. Yes madame therapist, I have not been very kind. Declared like the unused air that gathers in the backyard. Our three years are almost up, another of those irate red deadlines I’ve internalized. In the tea leaves a conflict arises. An end that draws near is no more than a horizon I stave off with a long paddle into the pond.

from Cold Meteor

On a scream a naked form flew. Feral feeling but no just cause. A search party wove its way into the loom. We clothed her, the voice. It was not clear what fabric would do, other than warm. Once I become aware of an alternative it is difficult to continue on. Do not say it, it's coming I know it but I'm hoping you won't. The fan fell from the window again. That's how she got out. I'm a speculative mind. You were below sea level. A meteor, too, hung in the sky, coming closer. When the impression of a dinosaur's skin was discovered in the sand, I briefly believed in science. It was so close to the illustrations I had seen. On the meteor everything happening here happens also. No, nothing's different. A comet is cold, like a mirror in the forest.